Day 58, 5/22/09 -- Flight simulation, take 1.

Today we had our first attempt at a flight simulation. It was, predictably, a complete disaster. Besides the detector power accidentally being shut off and losing all of our detectors, the azimuth motors have been exhibiting funny behavior that we spent the rest of the day looking into. And the detector power going out also screwed up the commanding for our half-wave-plate system.

On the bright side, after the detector power outage, it only took about a half hour to get them all back, which I think is a record for us.

Milligan, Hannes, and Joy flew out to Winslow, AZ where CSBF has their 'downrange station' set up for line-of-sight telemetry when payloads get out of range of Ft. Sumner. They set up a couple computers there along with the downlink hardware and made sure that everything worked before flying back. Bonus points for anyone who can name the famous song that mentions Winslow, AZ.

There's a possibility we'll fly on Sunday morning. Stay tuned...

No pictures today (what can I say, most everything just looks the same).